The carriage set off, and Mr. Lafitte, lolling back on the cushions, smoked placidly, and indolently gazed out of the window at the passengers. Presently, instead of passengers to gaze at, there were the elegant aristocratic dwellings in the streets on Beacon Hill, and soon after there were the dingy houses of the negro quarter.
His cigar smoked out, Mr. Lafitte enjoyed whatever there was to enjoy in the prospect the carriage window afforded. It was pretty near dinner-time in that region, and most of the people were indoors. A few colored men and women stood at some of the thresholds or looked out at the windows, and colored urchins were playing in the streets. The carriage driving slowly, Belknap street, South Russell street, Butolph street, Garden street, Centre street, May street, Grove street, and all the streets of the quarter, passed in successive review under the interested and inspecting eyes of the gallant Southerner.
In Grove street, a fancy came upon him to walk a few steps and note the effect from the pavement. Stopping the carriage, he got out, and bidding the driver wait there for him, he walked on, and turned the corner into Southac street.
Walking slowly, and contemplatively twirling his moustache, while he softly hummed an air, he gazed with a roving eye at the squalid and sunlit houses of mingled brick and wood which stood in the vertical light on either side of the street. There were few people about, fewer even than he had seen in the streets he had passed through, and beginning to find it a bore, he was turning to go back to the carriage, when his eye chanced to rest on the closed window of a house obliquely opposite to him, and stopping in the midst of his humming, his hand fell from his moustache, and he stood still.
There, behind the closed window of the second story, absently gazing out straight before him, stood William Roux! Mr. Lafitte knew him at the first glance, and an infernal joy bathed his heart. Afraid the next instant that he would be seen, he drew back into a narrow alley near by, still gazing up at the window. But he had no reason for apprehension, for the negro was apparently lost in reverie, and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking straight before him.
The entire abstraction of Roux’s manner suggested to Mr. Lafitte that there was no other person up there in the room, and a demoniac idea leaped at once into the brain of the slaveholder and took possession of him. Here was the carriage within fifty paces just round the corner. What was to prevent him from quietly walking up into that room, taking Roux by the arm, and quickly marching him off to it? It flashed into his mind just how Roux would behave. The submissive, docile negro, so different from that sullen, fiery Antony, overcome with fright he would never think of struggling, and with the old servile habit of instant obedience falling again upon him, cowed by the stern mandate, paralyzed by the strong grasp, thunder-stricken by the unexpected appearance of his old master, he would just march along without a word. Quickly he would walk him, cram him into the carriage, pull down the curtains, and drive away like fury. Ha! the moment when he should have him safe, rushed upon his brain like fire. One bold stroke—now for it!
Emerging from the alley, he quickly crossed the street, and mounted the wooden steps which he saw led up to Roux’s room. The door was ajar, and pausing for one moment to listen, with torrents of hellish exultation pouring through his being, he recognized by the silence that Roux was alone. Softly pushing open the door, which floated inward without a sound, he saw his victim standing with his back to him at the window, and crossing the floor on noiseless tiptoe, he tapped him on the shoulder.
Roux turned with a start, and with his black face flaring into ashen fright, he would have fallen to the floor, but Lafitte caught him by the throat with both hands, and upheld him.
“Not one word, you dog!” he hissed, glaring into his bulging eyes. “I have you! Stand!”
He released his throat, and Roux stood with a terrific look of agony on his visage, which seemed at once to have grown thin and grey.